Batting Stats Glossary

General Recommendations

The player, team and league statlines are now dramatically
different than when the site first launched, so a comprehensive list
of the stats would take far longer and would likely be much less
useful than previously. So we have implemented a tooltip solution
that shows you a description of the statistic when you hold your mouse
over the header abbreviation for the stat. You can try it below.

We also have implemented a sorting feature. When the header
abbreviation is red (and this is true of all red text), you can click
the header to sort by that column. In many cases the table contains
partial-season (for a traded player) and full-season data.
When this is the case, we hide the partial seasons in
the sorted results, and provide another tooltip to bring the partial
seasons back. Occasionally, there is a select box toggle that allows
you to hide or show players who may not have met some minimum
qualification, such as 502 PA's for the batting title. This only comes
into play when sorting on ratio stats like on-base percentage, but not
counting stats like home runs.

The CSV and PRE tooltips provide a means to get comma-separated
values suitable for loading into excel and pre-formatted text that
might work better in things like message boards and e-mails.

In some cases, a player's career may span seasons for which a stat
like strikeouts or sacrifice flies are not available and seasons for
which they are. In those cases we attempt to mark the statistic as
shown 162. This means that this
career total does not include all seasons the player played and
therefore we do not know the exact number.

For the most common stats found in our leaderboards, we denote league leading stats with
bold text. Major league leading totals are further marked with
italics. For career statistics, all-time leaders are marked with **'s
and active leaders with italics.

When a stat is unavailable its season entry should be blank, rather
than zero. This may not always be the case, but it is what we've tried
to do.

This value is calculated differently from the Total Baseball PRO+
statistic. Using OPS+ makes this difference more clear.
PRO+ seems to be:

OPS+ = PRO+ = 100 * ( OBP/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1)/BPF

Where lgOBP and lgSLG are the slugging and
on-base percentage of a league-average player, and BPF is the
batting park factor. This takes into account the difference in runs
scored in a team's home and road games, so it doesn't depend on how
good an offense or defense a team has.

Our method is slightly more complicated, but I think it is more
correct. The BPF is set up for runs and the way it is implemented in
PRO+ applies it to something other than runs.

Below that is the career high for the player in each category. It
is not their best season, but the best (highest/sometimes lowest) from
all the categories. You can quickly see what Barry Bonds' career
highs in strikeouts were along with walks, home runs, etc. We required
the qualifying number of plate appearances in a season for
consideration in career-best BA, SLG and OBP entries to be 1.55/team
game. If we didn't do this, you would end up with some players who had
1 hit in 2 at bats during a cup of coffee as their career best batting average.

This is an attempt to condense each batter's career into a single
season's worth of stats. With batters this is easy. Just take their
career games played and divide by 162, and then divide their career
totals by that factor.